Greetings! I’m Randall Packer: artist, composer, former Secretary of the US Department of Art & Technology, host of The Post Reality Show, and all around virus in the virtual realm.
I work in my secret, underground studio bunker in Washington, DC, its precise location cannot be divulged due to its highly sensitive nature.
Yet, through the alchemical magic of the Network, my studio is open to the world, where I conduct my daily ritual of making art in front of and for the camera.
The underground studio bunker is a place not without its dangers. Sure, you might find its cave-like solitude a bit disconcerting, but for me, it’s a necessary atmosphere for challenging the swirling chaos of life at the speed of light.
Plugged directly into the Media Torrent, I plumb the medial experience in its most extreme form, as a deep sea diver might examine obscure lifeforms in the depths of the sea, or perhaps like the scientists and psychic explorers who ingested the first artificial hallucinogens to unlock the mechanisms of altered perception.
And like the secret bunker drilled deep beneath the Vice-President’s mansion just down the road, where former VP Dick Cheney orchestrated in America’s finest hour his very own shadow government in the aftermath of the post-911 trauma, my studio bunker leads directly to the headquarters of the US Department of Art & Technology in Washington, DC.
It was here for a few brief heady years that I led my own virtual government agency as its Secretary. USDAT was my cause celébré, my call-to-action, a breeding ground for heroic acts of artistic mediation which, unfortunately, never quite succeeded in changing the world. But you can’t say I didn’t try…
After my Secretarial debut, I made the decision to go rogue following the infathomable second Bush Inauguration in 2004, declaring myself the Secretary-at-Large, descending ever deeper beneath the bunker into the Underworld of America.
A bit Dantesque in nature, I journeyed through a mythical Cosmology of Hell, exploring the horrific recesses of subterranean regions infiltrated by a cast of characters from the Fundamentalist Far Right, their eternal afflictions a consequence of atrocities of the human soul, the falsification of everything we know and desire, their sordid actions providing endless fodder for my artistic renderings.
Ever since my re-entry from the Underworld into the light of “reality,” I sometimes wonder ever I ever really came back. The allegorical manifestation of America’s Hell struck me like a crack in the human psyche, opening my eyes ever wider to the even grander spectacle of the political and social Show that has now taken center stage here in the nation’s capital.
You see, as a student of the virtual, I came to the realization that when reality tv audiences reach critical mass and elect their own leader, we will once and for all enter into a world far beyond the suspension of disbelief, far beyond the real, in another words, a world of total SHOW, 24/7, non-stop media confusion, in which there is no longer any differentiation between the real and the imaginary, that is, we will have entered into the post reality.
Now it’s hauntingly quiet down here in the bunker, like the calm before the storm, perhaps a little gloomy for most people’s tastes, but I manage to keep my spirits up ingesting the flow of information (it’s a beautiful thing!), dreaming the impossible, jotting down a few inspired notes in my journal now and then, savoring some delicious bit of situational irony about the unfolding reality circus here in Washington, DC, and then feverishly broadcasting it all back out again from wherever it came. What can’t you do when you have your very own Internet channel beamed out to the whole wide world!?
